Michael Girdley shows how to find business ideas by spotting disruptions in four areas: government, society, environment, and technology. He built Near, a staffing firm, by noticing U.S. companies hiring overseas, and CodeUp, a coding school, by seeing the gap between what colleges teach and what tech jobs need.
Here's how I use trends to find great business ideas. So what is a trend? A trend is specifically something that is changing in the world based on some sort of disruption. And it turns out there are 4 different types of disruptions that can happen that then cause trends to happen in the world beyond it. Number 1 is governmental. The government could change rules, which then causes a trend to happen in the rest of the world. Number 2 is social. If you look at the demographics, for example, say the United States, you have lots of people that are aging. And baby boomers, they own a lot of businesses. At some point, they're going to both want to sell those businesses, and then they're going to want to spend that money on other stuff like vacations or vacation homes. That is a societal change. You have environmental changes. You have things where the climate can potentially change. For example, there's theories that the climate's warming up, which I believe, and those sort of things can then turn into trends that are going to be happening in the broader planet. And then the last one, and the one we most often think about as a disruption, is technology. Mobile phones come along. Well, that creates an opportunity, say, for somebody to build a global network of independent taxis, i.e., Uber. So then there are those trends that happen, and then there's a special type trends called tailwinds. And let me explain to you tailwinds by telling you the story of us building a business. So back in 2021, I have two associates that had come to work with me, Hayden and Franco, and they ended up looking into a space where I thought there was a lot of trends. Tailwinds are what have caused every great business that I've founded to really succeed. So coming back to Hayden and Franco, we were out looking for ideas to pursue. We started looking at those trends that we saw around us: tight labor market, people being okay with remote, and the rise of the worldwide workforce. We saw those things happening and said, well, why don't we build a business to take advantage of particularly that. So we set out to build Near, which is a company that helps with staffing for people who are trying to hire from the US knowledge workers overseas. And in particular, we had a superpower on the team, which is Franco was based and is based in Buenos Aires, Argentina. So that's a great market for these type of employees. And we had myself and Hayden who were based in the United States. But we also saw that we had these trends behind us and in particular special trends, tailwinds. And for us, we wanted to build something that would ride those particular tailwinds. Today's sponsor is Moby Capital. Whether you need cash to solve a problem in your business or just need financing to grow as fast as you would like, Moby Capital is a great option. What's unique about their product is they offer financing in an unsecured manner. Moby Cap lends against your future revenue expectations, so there's no need to do things like pledge a house or do additional personal guarantees to make it work. And the best thing about Moby Cap, they're located just down the road from me here in Austin, Texas. and they can turn around loans in as often as just a few hours. If you're interested in learning more about Moby Capital, thanks to them for helping with the video today. Go to mobycap.com and tell them that you heard about it on Grow the World. Now back to the show. So building the business at first, we are kind of lazy people and I suggested we build a job board. Job boards are good, right? They don't require a lot of employees. You don't have to hire a bunch of people to scale them. The customers are self-service, high margin, and they can do well without you having to spend more time working on them. As we went and dug into that and talked to more customers, we discovered, well, that tailwind that I talked about before, American employers wanting to potentially hire overseas, that was a kind of a problem. They didn't really know how to do it. They needed somebody to hold their hands. So we shifted and pivoted our model to one that was much more of a staffing firm. And that's where we are today. We spend our days helping clients staff with overseas folks, help them bridge that cultural divide, and do even basic simple stuff like how do you do background checks for people who are overseas? Frankly, I didn't know how to do it before Franco taught me. And if you look at every business that I've done that has turned out to be a success, they've all had massive tailwinds behind them. We built CodeUp, our coding school here in San Antonio. Total interest in people wanting to get better jobs, and the trend of colleges not doing their job and providing job training was totally continuing and getting exacerbated. So that's what I see every time I look and I see a business that totally thrives. It's because I had great tailwinds behind me. And so the way this methodology works is pretty straightforward. You go find those tailwinds, which are based on the trends, and then you do what we did with Mere, which is you go dive into the particular problem that people are having. And from that, a good business model can come from it. And the good The good news is it'll all be easier because the world is conspiring in your favor rather than against you. That's why I love doing and building businesses with this trends-based methodology. Thanks for watching this video here on YouTube. If you enjoyed it, like, repost, comment below, share it with your friends. I would be super grateful. I'm working really hard on these and hope to make each one better than the last one. So enjoy, and I'll see you next week.
